Brutal

J.D. Tuccille writes about the very disturbing video of a King County officer assaulting a 15-year-old girl in her holding cell. If you haven’t seen the video yet, you can see it in this KOMO News report below:

I wonder how well Deputy (for now) Paul Schene is getting along with his wife Stephanie? He filed for divorce in January 2007, but they mutually dismissed the divorce action in August 2007. However, Paul and Stephanie are currently registered to vote at distinctively different addresses.

When a man is violent towards women in one context, then he tends to be violent towards women in other contexts as well. Especially when there is substance abuse involved. The P-I says Schene was arrested for drunk driving in 2006. He apparently went into deferred prosecution, which will not result in a conviction if he is successful with alcohol treatment and avoids getting convicted for any crime during his five year deferral period. (If he gets an assault conviction, that should pretty much automatically give him a DUI conviction for violating the deferral conditions.)

Schene and his wife evidently have a child or children, since his dissolution mentions parenting plan issues. If Schene is a violent abusive drunk, then that is especially bad for his children, who are probably pretty young (since Schene is only 31).

She had to certainly be injured in that attack. At no point is there any evidence that she resisted anything. She couldn’t have, sinc he was brutal from the minute he rammed her into the wall. If that didn’t handle it, pummeling her in the head while she was pushed down into the floor would have done it.

What gives you the right to snoop into the deputy’s personal life? This case has NOTHING to do with his divorce, you asshat. Really? So any public-employed person, who receives an income from the taxpayers and (in this and some other cases) is given authority to use deadly force against citizens (of this or any nation), is free from any scrutiny regarding their semi-public (court documents you say) records versus their job performance???? Amazing, we could have saved the taxpayers tens of millions of dollars if that were true (can you say Gary Condit?).

@11: All that stuff is public record, and is probably going to be submitted at his trial if there is one. I’m sure his lawyers are already preparing a defense for this angle of establishing his instability as a person and professional.

She was riding as a passenger in her parent’s car and the car had been reported stolen.

Definitely he deserves to lose his badge.

Irrespective of whether he is found guilty or spends any time in jail – what type of judgment do you have if you KNOW there is a surveillance camera in the holding cell and you do this stupid thing anyway?

You have to be incredibly stupid. It’s the equivalent to a shoplifter standing in front of a security camera and using the glass to adjust his clothes while he shoves a 6 pack of beer down his pants. It’s the type of video they show on those “stupid crook” or “caught on tape” shows. It makes me glad I don’t live in Burien.

Those of you who haven’t might be advised to read “An Open Letter To A Bad Cop”, the first chaper of Norm Stamper’s book, Breaking Rank. You can find it on Google Books.

This guy’s behavior and David Brame’s murder of his wife and suicide are different points on the scale of an all-too common syndrome among police officers. When a cop gets kinked out by the unique stresses of the job and starts taking it out in the form of inappropriate violence against women and the defenseless, that pattern gets reinforced each time he gets away with it. Most police departments of any size have means in place to intervene when an officer’s behavior starts to go off the scale, and I’m sure the King Co. Sheriff’s Dept. is no exception. For this guy not to have been dealt with earlier suggests there’s room for some improvement.

What intrigued me was the conduct of the other officer. I’m not surprised he didn’t try to stop Schene from roughing up the girl, as the other officer couldn’t see what happened beforehand. But his conduct afterward of exteme nonchalance is rather disturbing. It’s like he sees it every day, this incident was nothing unusual.

Of course, before there were pervasive video cameras this would usually have resulted in the officers filing additional charges against the girl for “assaulting a police officer”, so they could justify the cuts and bruises on her as “resulting from reasonable attempts to restrain the suspect”. With only the word of two officers against a 15-year-old girl who was just caught in a car that had been reported stolen, there is no way she isn’t convicted, especially if she were black.

Even so, I wouldn’t want to send this officer into the general population in Walla Walla, if he were convicted. An assault like this deserves some time in jail, but it shouldn’t be a death sentence.

20. rhp6033 spews: Even so, I wouldn’t want to send this officer into the general population in Walla Walla, if he were convicted. An assault like this deserves some time in jail, but it shouldn’t be a death sentence.

I wonder how many times this government employee has victimized citizens before without a camera recording it.

Every case he has worked on should be reviewed.

And so what if he goes to the general population, some of the citizens he beat would probably like a chance to return the favor.

If the smart-mouth of a 15 year old girl can make you snap and prompt you into violence like that, you shouldn’t be a cop. Take his badge away, get him counseling, some time in jail to think about it and a different job.

Yes, it is always best to be proactive and take a criminal down when they display aggression. “But she’s just a 15 year old girl!” you squeal. Doesn’t matter. The now deceased Deputy Herzog didn’t react to that naked guy up in Newcastle because the guy was naked. What harm could a naked man do, right?

Point two, how did the Jail Deputy not know that the girl’s shoes were packed with explosives, and failed to explode, just like the shoe bomber, Richard Reid? Maybe that’s what was going through the Deputy’s mind. Maybe, in his mind, he had to stop her from launching her second shoe bomb.

The good cops don’t like this sort of thing because it gives their whole profession a black eye. In a large police department you’re bound to have some hiring mistakes. The problem is you can’t get rid of them. The problem is there’s no accountability to the public. The problem is there are no effective mechanisms for public input or accountability. The problem is that we as a society, and especially the media, suck up to the police to the point where we make any distinction between good cops and bad cops, don’t make any effort to attract and keep good cops and get rid of bad ones, and nothing ever happens to bad cops when incidents like this happen. There needs to be a fundamental cultural change in what we expect of police and whether we insist on getting it before this will change; and until then, you’re going to have bad cops murdering people in subway stations, shoving broomstick handles up immigrants’ rectums, and beating up troubled teens in cells.

Send the out of control sorry excuse for a police officer punk to Walla Walla to the general population for a few days. Let us see how long it takes for him to cry out to be transferred to “punk city” (protective custody) after the real tough guys turn him into a little girl and pimp his dumb ass all over the big yard. karm is karma.

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